Nocking the Arrow

"Autonomy is what distinguishes between personal learning, which we do for ourselves, and personalized learning, which is done for us." - Stephen Downes Why is feedback critical to learning processes? Why should the learner be at the center of the feedback process? Where within Schoology can personal feedback be shared and leveraged by learners? What do paper airplanes have to do with personal learning and feedback? Premise On the second day of the SchoologyNEXT-19 conference, more than 100 adult learners gathered to build paper airplanes and discuss these questions. Here’s what we learned. Those who’ve attended my sessions know I subtly push the envelope, taking some risk, in the hopes of the transfer of the unique experience to professional learning activities and classroom adventures. If we don't want passive "sit-n-git" in our classrooms, then we should design conference sessions and staff meetings to model the active learning we...

My wife and anyone who knows me well will tell you, I have minimalistic tendencies, and I have a severe aversion to clutter. Granted, my closets and cloud storage could use some organizing. In my world, there are specific places for things, and things left out of position are to be considered clutter.  Since we recognize Digital Citizenship Week at our schools, my professional learning team has been engaged in conversations about digital privacy and security. These conversations prompted me to take a deeper dive into my digital waters. Do I have vulnerable accounts? Why am I getting so much spam? Who has access to my information? As Erik Qualman reminds us, privacy in our modern digital contexts doesn't genuinely exist. It's up to individuals to take responsibility for what they're sharing and not sharing on the world wide web. My digital interactions are relatively conservative and limited in scope. Yet, I was surprised to learn several of my accounts, including ...